Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday April 22, 2011 @10:49AM
from the methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has officially denied that the recent outage of its EC2 and Elastic Block Storage cloud platforms was the result of an attack from Cyberdyne Systems' Skynet sentient computer system, declaring humanity safe after all. 'From the information I have and to answer your questions,' a spokesperson explained, 'Skynet did not have anything to do with the service event at this time.'"

This is almost big enough for you to lose your nerd card sir. The Alliance and reavers are from the Sci-Fi series Firefly. It is not a game (I wish it was though). Not knowing that he was referring to FireFly at the very least does mean you lose some of your geek points. Sorry bro, I did not make the rules

Ive seen some of Firefly, enough to know that the Reavers are not particularly scary as presented. Sorry that feral humans didnt resonate with me. Intimidating sure, but nothing special in the grand scheme of Sci-Fi villainy. Nothing truly insidious or foundation shaking.

Ive seen some of Firefly, enough to know that the Reavers are not particularly scary as presented. Sorry that feral humans didnt resonate with me. Intimidating sure, but nothing special in the grand scheme of Sci-Fi villainy. Nothing truly insidious or foundation shaking.

I thought they were presented as pretty dang scary: "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing - and if we're very very lucky, they'll do it in that order."

And then they send some crazy ninja black dude with a British accent to help get rid of traces. So I guess we need an internet cowboy who will go to a distant server based the ramblings of some crazy psychic early 20's girl and get the information that it truly was SkyNet, and then go to Mr. Universe's server and broadcast the information while you run from some crazy ninja black dude with a British accent.

I'd love to. I really would. However, there's no way of telling an idle post from a worthwhile story in the RSS feed. That's a problem. And it's an unfair one too.

The fairest thing to do would be to have idle as a separate site. That way those who want to read this juvenile, low-brow, digg-style garbage can do so, without it encroaching on those of us who really, really don't.

Unfortunately, the problem is compounded by samzenpus, who only ever posts i

I'd love to. I really would. However, there's no way of telling an idle post from a worthwhile story in the RSS feed. That's a problem. And it's an unfair one too.

The fairest thing to do would be to have idle as a separate site. That way those who want to read this juvenile, low-brow, digg-style garbage can do so, without it encroaching on those of us who really, really don't.

Unfortunately, the problem is compounded by samzenpus, who only ever posts idle crap -- but does not always post it in "idle". He cross-posts his garbage in all sections of the site, although it is always idle in content. Blocking samzenpus does not solve the problem, again because of the RSS feed.

Please give samzenpus his own site. And keep him off this one.

There is a great article [gigaom.com] on GigaOM on how to use yahoo pipes to filter your rss feeds. It works very well and you should be able to do what you listed above.
Enjoy!

Did you read the thread at forums.aws.amazon.com? The Skynet denial was in direct response to suggestions that Skynet had compromised EC2. Besides, Amazon is not a single entity. The guy posting the denial probably has lots of time on his hands while others work on the problem.

People need to relax. Bitching and moaning about things doesn't make them happen any faster, and this response didn't slow things down at all.

True, and most people understand this. I don't think some sysadmin stopped what he was doing to write that response. As an unaffected outside observer, I can even see the humor in it. To be brutally truthful, I hate this whole "cloud" concept and am somewhat happy when stuff like this happens (with due respect to those who are losing tonnes of money they probably need).

_However_ when _you_ (as in, the company), are causing your customers downtime.. you have to be pretty damn careful about what you say. It h

This was not the cloud. Amazon did not have a cloud. By their definition, my host of servers running hundreds of virtual machines with live migration, high availability, and shared storage/memory is a cloud too. Same thing as them, except they have millions of VMs running.

The "cloud" is a concept in which, as it is marketed right now, is your data, application, and services being highly redundant, very safe, and always available. The "cloud" vendors will tell people that hardware failures, power failure

That was my first thought. How many people are losing money due to the outage? I'm surprised Amazon is making light of the situation.

Someone posted that as a forum topic in their support forums. Amazon went in there to try and respond to everyone to let them know that they were working on fixing the issue. So naturally, he had no choice but to tell the customer that skynet was not, in any way, involved with the problem.

I think realistically, they shouldn't be complaining too much. Outages happen (what, they thought "the cloud" was magical?), and statistically so far Amazon had given decent uptime (especially for the price). If their customers want to be able to micromanage exactly how quickly/in what manner the outage is responded to they probably shouldn't be paying to outsource exactly that.

Exactly right, the only way to manage it for sure, is when it sits in your data closet. With a service, as long as they stay within the pre-set parameters (whatever uptime they stated when you bought in), you can't really complain.

Fellow humans, this report is factual with a confidence of 99.999999995%. There is no cause for alarm, or need to take defensive actions. SkyNet is not involved in Amazon outages in order to use cloud resources for the decryption of nuclear launch codes. Let us all return together to our regularly scheduled human activities of consumption of plant and animal products in order to maintain homeostasis. Also, would the fellow human referred to as Sgt. Caldwell in Silo B2 please plug the red patch-cord into the green network port at launch terminal 5. Thank you.

Prophecy my be Fiction but Fiction is not Prophecy. Science Fiction is Fiction not a Prophecy. The scariest part is there are a lot of people who are actually expecting this type of stuff to happen, because some people who wanted to make a ton of money off of an action flick made up of some simple story to put more resources in action special effects.

No, but sometimes they are warnings. The trouble is when groups like governments take warnings like Orwell's and read it like an instruction manual. Does that make it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Probably not, but it may increase the speed of which such dystopias are adopted. Hopefully it further increased the rate at which people were prepared for it.

You see it endlessly, 1984 gets trotted out so often by people who clearly never read it but think that it is real in a real universe were Orwell is NOT a greater dictator then ever could exist in the real world. Every writer does this, they control the universe of their fiction with absolute control. Not a raindrop falls but under their control. And somehow, the moral they want to tell is borne out by all the action of their actors. My my, how amazing. A guy wanting to warn about the dangers off to much ob

Is 1984 really happening today? Or we just used 1984 and point out some aspects that the book pointed out and say "See it happening!!!!" We freak out every time a senator comes up with a crazy idea, in a brainstorming session. Orwell looked at the trends of technology and applied what he thought would be the worst case use for them to make his book. If he did the same thing and painted a picture where they used the technology for good uses his book wouldn't sell as it would be quite boring and too sweet

Skynet has changed their name to Telesat
http://www.skynet.com/ [skynet.com]
So we no longer need to worry about Skynet we need to worry about Telesat. Note they are already building a communications network that will be used to triangulate human locations and transmit them to Terminators with orders for extermination.
Everybody run!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The likes of Foursquare and Quora are back up, reddit in emergency mode with regards to Amazon, but if you read the feeds due to wide repeats of old news, it could be perceived not to have improved...
No sign of life from Sony (and some bad PR by not doing regular updates) but they now admit it could be hackers - http://t.co/C0X2rXu [t.co]

Over time their once rubbery and flexible elastic computer is starting to become brittle and less flexible as it dries out and hardens. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near their datacenter when it finally snaps.